But they kept going back to fix the map to make it more gerrymandered. That’s undisputed. The people involved in the process had traditional maps that complied with traditional criteria and then went back and threw out those maps and created more -- some that were more partisan. . . . So why didn’t they take one of the earlier maps?

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR

Could you tell me what the value is to democracy from political gerrymandering? How -- how does that help our system of government?

Appellee’s Test

The appellees lay out their test for determining partisen gerrymandering:

First, it must find that the map was designed with discriminatory intent: “to place a severe
impediment on the effectiveness of the votes of individual citizens on the basis of their political
affiliation.” Second, it must determine that the map causes a “large and durable” discriminatory effect: one that is “sizeable” and likely to “persist throughout the decennial period.” And third, it must conclude that there is no valid justification for this effect: no way to explain it the legitimate state prerogatives and neutral factors that are implicated in the districting process.”

False Positives

The problem with false positives:

Ms. MURPHY

Sure. So I think some of the problems with the criteria that have been suggested, in particular with the tests that focus on these symmetry metrics, is that so far the metrics that we have, I mean, they identify false positives roughly 50 percent of the time.

Mr. TSEYTLIN

This is plain -- Plaintiff’s expert studied maps from 30 years, and he identified the 17 worst of the worst maps. What is so striking about that list of 17 is that 10 were neutral draws.

Avalere estimates that it would cause a $215 billion cut between 2026, while the CBPP pegs it at $239 billion. Broadly, the two analyses agree: Graham-Cassidy means less money put toward health care programs.

Both show pretty clearly the trade-off Graham-Cassidy makes: it sends money from states that have high Obamacare enrollment (largely through Medicaid expansion) to those with less robust sign-ups. According to Avalere’s analysis, California loses $78 billion while Alabama gains $5 billion between 2020 and 2026.

Equifax Breach & Arbitration

[The breach may have] compromised data from 143 million Americans including Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and credit card numbers. About 209,000 credit card numbers were exposed as well as “dispute documents with personal identifying information” for 182,000 Americans, the company said in a news release.

Arbitration Clauses

How does the 7th Amendment right to trial by jury square with arbitration clauses?

In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Almost all states, other than LA and CO, have a similar clause in their state constitution. Most other countries have eliminated jury trials.

Predispute arbitration agreements are problematic in a number of ways, one of which is the fact that such contracts are signed well before any dispute arises between the parties. These predispute agreements are often vague and give little notice to the signing parties of the kinds of conflicts that will subject them to arbitration proceedings and the specific rights they are surrendering. Because predispute agreements are entered into before the grounds on which the waiver of rights is based can be known, there is no real “meeting of the minds,” as contract law requires between two parties who commit to a binding agreement.

Sidebars

Shriley cards, pictures of white women, were used to color balance in the 1940-1970s. Things did not change re: brown people until the furniture makers and chocolate makers complained that their furnitures and chocolate not looking good on camera.

[S]he has a tip dark-skinned folks can use to improve their club selfies using just their phones. “Stand close to a soft light source and turn three quarters to the light, so that it’s not filling in everything the same way. Kind of like a Rembrandt painting.”

North Korea Redux

The new assessment by the ­Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which shaves a full two years off the consensus forecast for North Korea’s ICBM program, was prompted by recent missile tests showing surprising technical advances by the country’s weapons scientists, at a pace beyond what many analysts believed was possible for the isolated communist regime.